Team Canada vows to ‘give it all we’ve got’ in world curling finals

Tyler Tardi and his Langley-based team will walk away from the World Junior Curling Championships in Aberdeen, Scotland with at least a silver medal.

Tardi and his Canadian team of Sterling Middleton, Jordan Tardi, Zachary Curtis, alternate Jacques Gauthier, coach Paul Tardi and team leader/coach Melissa Soligo will face host Scotland for gold on tomorrow (Saturday).

The championship matchup is set for 6 a.m. Pacific time and will be broadcast on-line on World Curling TV.

Canada defeated Andrew Stopera of the United States 8-5 in Friday’s semi-final and now meets undefeated Ross Whyte, whose Scottish team edged Switzerland 5-4 with a draw to the button, with backing, on his last shot.

A three-ender in the third opened up a 3-0 lead for skip Tardi, who had hammer and took advantage of it.

“Those three points in the third end were a little unexpected actually,” he said. “We didn’t really see that coming, but obviously we’re happy with that start to the game against a good team and how it turned out.

“Both Scotland and Switzerland are really great teams and both deserved to be this far. We’re going to go into the last game and just play how we’ve been playing and just give it all we’ve got.”

Scotland defeated Canada 6-5, with a deuce in the 10th end, as part of its perfect 9-0 round-robin record.

“I can’t really believe it right now, we’ve just had a really good week so far and we just hope to continue it into the final,” said Whyte.

“They made a good two in the ninth and we wanted to get ourselves into the situation where we had last stone and a shot for the win. We felt quite confident,” he added of the final draw for the win against the Swiss.

“We knew that the ice had been really good for the whole week and we continued to throw a good one at the end, the same as the start. It was always going to be a really tricky (draw). We didn’t want to look too far in front. It’s still not clicked in. We’re just taking it game by game and we’re just happy that we’re in that gold-medal game tomorrow. Same old, same old, hopefully. If we can continue that we’ll be really happy.”